Posts published by Charles M. Blow

That’s the message voters sent the Republican Party and its Tea Party wing Tuesday night when they re-elected President Obama and strengthened the Democrats’ control of the Senate.

No amount of outside money or voter suppression or fear mongering or lying — and there was a ton of each — was enough to blunt that message.

President Obama and his formidable campaign machine out-performed the Republicans, holding together a winning coalition that is the face of America’s tomorrow: young voters, urban voters, racially and ethnically diverse voters and women voters.

According to exit polls, Obama won 60 percent of the 18 to 29 year old vote and 52 percent of the 30-40 vote. He won 69 percent of the vote in big cities and 58 percent of the vote in mid-sized cities. He won 93 percent of the black vote and more than 70 percent of both the Asian vote and the Hispanic vote. He won over half of the female vote. And he won 76 percent of the gay, lesbian and bisexual vote.

It’s a changing country, the demographics are changing. It’s not a traditional America anymore, and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff. They want things. And who is going to give them things? President Obama.

If Mitt Romney cannot win in this economy, then the tipping point has been reached. We have more takers than makers and it’s over. There is no hope.

Rush Limbaugh took to the air to say that “Mitt Romney and his family would have been the essence of exactly what this country needs” and that Romney “did offer a vision of traditional America.” Limbaugh went on:

I went to bed last night thinking we’re outnumbered. I went to bed last night thinking all this discussion we’d had about this election being the election that will tell us whether or not we’ve lost the country. I went to bed last night thinking we’ve lost the country.

You would think that the world came to an end Tuesday night. And depending on your worldview, it might have. If your idea of America’s power structure is rooted in a 1950s or even a 1920s sensibility, here’s an update: that America is no more.

Republicans are trying to hold back a storm surge of demographic change with a white picket fence. Good luck with that.

This election may go down in history as the moment when truth and lies lost their honor and stigma, respectively.

Mitt Romney has demonstrated an uncanny, unflinching willingness to say anything and everything to win this election. And that person, the unprincipled prince of untruths, is running roughly even with or slightly ahead of the president in the national polls.

What does this say about our country? What does it say about the value of virtue?

The list of Romney’s out-and-out lies (and yes, there is no other more polite word for them) is too long to recount here. So let’s just take one of the most recent ones: the utterly false claim that General Motors and Chrysler shipped, or planned to ship, American auto jobs to China.

First, let’s take on the Chrysler claim.

On Saturday, The Des Moines Register endorsed Mitt Romney because it thought that he would be “the stronger candidate” to forge “compromises in Congress.” On Tuesday, the news side of that same publication fact-checked Romney’s Chrysler-China claim and found that it was a lie.

Mitt Romney first told a crowd in Ohio on Thursday that Chrysler was shifting the production of Jeeps to China. Then he aired an ad claiming that President Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China.” (The clear impression in the ad is that American jobs will be lost.) Neither is true.

The paper continued:

Jeep sales have nearly tripled since 2009, according to Chrysler, and the company has added 4,600 jobs to its Jeep plants since then. Another 1,100 jobs will be added at an Ohio plant next year. Sales of Jeep in China have grown in recent years and Chrysler plans to resume vehicle production there, but not at the expense of American jobs.

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesGM’s facility in north Texas is undergoing an expansion project that is expected to create over a thousand new jobs by the end of November.

Now on to GM. The Romney ad claims that “under President Obama, GM cut 15,000 American jobs, but they are planning to double the number of cars built in China, which means 15,000 more jobs for China.”

We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.

But those numbers don’t tell the whole story. GM eliminated old brands and shuttered dealerships when it went through bankruptcy in 2009 — resulting in fewer jobs. The alternative was to go out of business entirely.

And made one further point:

The radio ad goes on to falsely claim that the reduction in GM’s U.S. payroll “means 15,000 more jobs for China.” That’s not true. As we wrote once before, GM is expanding operations in China to meet increased demand there for its vehicles. The increase in its China operations is unrelated to its U.S. operations.

Romney wouldn’t acknowledge the truth if it kissed him on the cheek. In fact, Romney seems to have decided that the only things standing between him and the White House are stubborn facts. He continues to roll right over them.

The question is: will this scurrilous tactic have negative consequences?

Unfortunately, there is some evidence that facts and the people who check them don’t carry the same weight that they once did.

First, the right’s disinformation machine is, explicitly and implicitly, making the argument that facts (science, math, evidence) are fungible and have been co-opted by liberal eggheads. They have declared war on facts in response to what they claim is a liberal war on faith.

This is an utterly false and ridiculous argument, but it works on some people.

According to a Quinnipiac University/New York Times/CBS News Swing State poll released Wednesday, President Obama has a 9 percentage point lead over Romney in Ohio among likely voters on the question of who is honest and trustworthy (most people thought that the president was honest while most would not say the same about Romney). But that same poll found that the president only had a 5-point lead in the horse race numbers in Ohio.

The president had a similarly large lead on the honesty question in Florida and in Virginia, but in those states the poll found the race to be virtually tied — the president had a small lead that was within the margin of error.

How is it that so many people are willing to support a man who they don’t believe is honest or trustworthy?

The poll also found that most voters didn’t believe that Romney cared about their problems. On the other hand, at least 60 percent of voters in each state said that they believed that the president cared about their problems.

Who votes for a man who doesn’t care about you over a man who does?

I recognize that Obama hatred is a real thing, but disliking the president so much that you would do harm to yourself by voting for someone who you admit you don’t trust seems to be taking things to extremes.

All the voters who are aware of Romney’s fact-mangling but vote for him anyway must ask themselves this question: are they granting him the liberty to lie?

No, that’s not the beginning of one of those a-man-walks-into-a-bar jokes. It actually happened.

Ryan delivered the speech Wednesday in Cleveland. “In this war on poverty,” he said, “poverty is winning.” What he didn’t say is that he and his budget have taken sides in that war — and not on the side of the poor.

This is just the latest of Mitt Romney’s home-stretch attempts to kick up the dust of confusion, soften harsh rhetoric and policies, and slip into the White House.

At one point on Wednesday, Ryan said: “Where government is entrusted with providing a safety net, Mitt Romney and I have our own vision for how to keep it strong.”

Well, let’s see what the paper trail says.

According to a March Report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan would get at least 62 percent of its $5.3 trillion in nondefense budget cuts over ten years (relative to a continuation of current policies) from programs that serve people of limited means. This stands a core principle of President Obama’s fiscal commission on its head and violates basic principles of fairness.

At another point on Wednesday, he said: “The short of it is that there has to be a balance – allowing government to act for the common good, while leaving private groups free to do the work that only they can do.”

It is funny that you should mention these “private groups,” Mr. Ryan.

In a series of letters early this year the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly rebuked the Ryan budget.

Congress faces a difficult task to balance needs and resources and allocate burdens and sacrifices. Just solutions, however, must require shared sacrifice by all, including raising adequate revenues, eliminating unnecessary military and other spending, and fairly addressing the long-term costs of health insurance and retirement programs. The House-passed budget resolution fails to meet these moral criteria. We join other Christian leaders in insisting a “circle of protection” be drawn around essential programs that serve poor and vulnerable people.

At a time of great competition for agricultural resources and budgetary constraints, the needs of those who are hungry, poor and vulnerable should come before assistance to those who are relatively well off and powerful. With other Christian leaders, we urge the committee to draw a “circle of protection” around resources that serve those in greatest need and to put their needs first even though they do not have powerful advocates or great influence.

The moral measure of this budget debate is not which party wins or which powerful interests prevail, but rather how those who are jobless, hungry, homeless or poor are treated. Their voices are too often missing in these debates, but they have the most compelling moral claim on our consciences and our common resources.

Ryan, of course, is Catholic.

Now, back to Ryan’s speech. He said: “The truth is, Mitt and I believe in true compassion and upward mobility – and we are offering a vision based on real reforms for lifting people out of poverty.”

However, Ryan’s 2010 budget (promulgated when the Democrats still controlled the House) proposed eliminating the capital gains tax. According to a 2011 Congressional Research Service report, the main drivers of income inequality in this country from 1996 to 2006 were the growth of capital gains and dividends:

Capital gains and dividends were a larger share of total income in 2006 than in 1996 (especially for high-income taxpayers) and were more unequally distributed in 2006 than in 1996. Changes in capital gains and dividends were the largest contributor to the increase in the overall income inequality.

In subsequent budgets, including the most recent one that passed the House, Ryan dropped the language about eliminating the capital gains tax, but it’s not clear what his plans are. In a June interview, he was asked directly if he would “lower the write-offs for 401(k)s or capital gains and dividends?”

His answer was evasive and left room for interpretation: “I don’t know the answer to your question. What I do know is, we think the smart thing to do – a lot of other countries have done this – is to lower our tax rates.”

Ryan also said on Wednesday:

Mitt Romney and I want to apply this idea to other anti-poverty programs, such as Medicaid and food stamps. The federal government would continue to provide the resources, but we would remove endless federal mandates and restrictions that hamper state efforts to make these programs more effective.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, Ryan’s plan to block grant Medicaid — which provides health care to low-income individuals — would “involve reduced eligibility for Medicaid and CHIP, coverage of fewer services, lower payments to providers, or increased cost sharing by beneficiaries—all of which would reduce access to care.” A new study by the Urban Institute finds that Ryan’s plan would reduce Medicaid enrollment by a whopping 50 percent.

So Ryan — the man whose budget would wreak havoc on the poor — steps to a podium and pretends to be a defender of the poor.

Tuesday’s debate went the way folks thought the first one would: with President Obama outmaneuvering Mitt Romney, defending his own record forcefully and not letting Romney slip away from his. Obama called Romney out on things that were “not true” — a phrase he used in some form at least six times. Romney, for his part, committed unforced errors, as is his wont.

The contest was a clear victory for Obama. Not a devastating loss for Romney, but a clear win for the president. Now the world makes sense again. Crestfallen Democrats took a breath. Giddy Republicans stopped walking on air.

Can someone get this man a binder full of facts?

The president came into the debate with lowered expectations, but he exceeded them. According to the Pew Research Center, people expected Obama to outperform Romney in the first debate by a margin of 51 percent to 29 percent. But after Obama performed like he was catatonic and Romney performed like he was over-caffeinated, things changed. The performance expectation gap going into the second debate was negligible, with just 41 percent thinking Obama would do better and 37 percent thinking Romney would win the day.

The president performed brilliantly, with force, verve and agility. As we used to say down south: he showed up and showed out. The base loved it.

Even the snap polls, which I take with a grain of salt because they can tilt Republican in their samples, gave the edge to Obama.

This time, it was Romney who did himself damage.

He completely flubbed his line of attack on Benghazi.

Then there was Romney’s odd “binders full of women” comment about seeking suggestions from women’s groups to “find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet” when he was governor of Massachusetts.

He was laboring to avoid answering the actual question about pay equity for women.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor. They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

Can someone get this man a binder full of facts?

Romney has spent the last few weeks shedding his “severely conservative” plumage like the feathers from a molting chicken. But on Tuesday night the president reminded voters of who his challenger was a few months — and a few years — ago. The picture that emerged was Whiplash Willard, a man you can never truly love and about whom you can always find something to loathe.

The master stroke came at the end. Answering the final question, Romney offered a defense against an assault that had not yet been levied, a defense he had rehearsed for the attack he anticipated over his negative comments about the 47 percent. But Obama didn’t level this attack until his very last comment, when Romney could not respond. Crafty.

Even stylistically, Romney hit the wrong notes.

There is a fine line between feistiness and testiness. Romney has never negotiated that line well in debates and last night he fell over it again. At one point he scolded the president — the president of the United States! — “you’ll get your chance in a moment. I’m still speaking.”

Regardless of how it may have felt in the hall and how his base may have received his abrasive behavior, to most others watching it was déclassé and indecorous. When you’re challenging a sitting president for his job, you have to respect the office, even if you don’t respect the man.

Hey you! Come down off that ledge. Let’s talk this through. It’s not as bad as it seems.

Yes, the president’s performance in the last debate was, to put it mildly, unfortunate. Yes, Mitt Romney plowed over the truth like road kill and drove away free as a bird. Yes, the narrow swath of voters in the middle — many of whom may be low-information, low-engagement voters — responded to Romney’s forcefulness and were put off by the president’s passivity. Yes, Romney got a post-debate bump.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. But that doesn’t mean all is lost. It isn’t.

Romney’s post-debate bounce essentially wiped out Obama’s post-convention bounce so we’re pretty much back to where we started: a tight race in which the president holds a narrow lead (when all polls are taken together), but also one in which he is still highly favored to win the electoral college.

Those numbers could change, but they haven’t yet.

I can understand a certain amount of unease in the Obama-supporting public in general, but within the left-leaning press it’s inexcusable. Only the laziest political commentators could look at the current state of play and see doom for Obama. In fact, the panic among professional liberal pundits is a bit like screaming fire in a theater showing a Michael Moore documentary. Cut it out and grow up!

While the profession is still obsessing about the last debate and Obama’s stumbles, Mitt Romney is strutting around with his bad math pitching himself as a born-again moderate. He is selling vast tax cuts on the vaguest of specifics. It’s like one of those childhood lullabies that sounds good until you realize what it’s actually saying: that the bough breaks and the baby falls.

Also as part of the new “moderate Mitt” offensive, Romney told the Des Moines Register on Tuesday that

There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.

What kind of wishy-washy, sidewinder statement is that? Do you even know what a simple, declarative statement is Mr. Romney? Did no one teach you that at your fancy boarding school?

Not only is the statement squishy, but, based on Romney’s previously stated positions, it’s a lie. As Planned Parenthood Action Fund pointed out:

Romney changes positions the way a pop diva changes outfits. There is no way to know what he actually believes. That is not the mark of an honest man. That should be the focus of all of our attention and consternation. Obama’s debate performance was disappointing, but Romney’s allergy to the truth could prove disastrous.

The best cure for a bad debate performance is another debate, and the vice-presidential debate is Thursday night. So let’s get ahold of ourselves. Hysteria is uncalled for and unseemly.

Paul Ryan can come across as having bought into his own hype as a higher order thinker. The beltway-anointed “policy wonk” and “numbers whiz” often tries to avoid answering questions by saying that the answers are too complicated. I call that an incredibly condescending cop out: “Don’t worry your pretty little heads with these big ugly numbers. Just trust me.”

Ryan has convictions — those that the Romney campaign would let him keep — but he hardly strikes me as a genius. Furthermore, he can be quite an awkward speaker, trying a bit too hard to appear earnest.

Vice President Biden, on the other hand, has demonstrated that he’s a strong debater. Although can be a bit of a loose cannon, he is also very good at summarizing complicated concepts in simple ways. And he has passion aplenty.

I’m not predicting winners and losers for Thursday’s debate (the first presidential debate should have demonstrated the hazards of that), but I am saying that the vice president has the advantage. Whether he will leverage it is another question.

My only real prediction is that there will be more twists between now and Election Day. Anyone wanting reassurance will be left wanting. The race will remain fluid. The candidate who has a good day is not guaranteed a good tomorrow. Overconfidence is a curse. Momentum can turn on a dime.

This means that voters and pundits must take the long view and not a short one. Winning an individual battle is good, but winning the war is the goal. Resist the urge to panic when you’re down and to celebrate when you are up.

President Obama’s stylistic strategy during Wednesday night’s debate seemed to be to try to stay right above the rancor, to appear dignified, presidential. The problem with that approach is that the line between dignified and presidential and anodyne and weak is the width of a cat’s hair.

Romney, on the other hand, went on the attack, interrupting and rambling on, which to some will read as confidence and command of the facts, even if many of his statements were riddled with the, um, nonfactual. (Instead of larding this post with these points, I direct you to The New York Times’s fact-check of the debate.)

More Responses to the Debate

The president didn’t call him on these issues. Why? The president let Romney interrupt and talk over him. Why? The president didn’t even mention Romney’s secretly recorded statement about the “47 percent.” Why?

The passion that the president exhibits on the campaign trail never showed up on the debate stage. To my mind, that was a mistake.

This is the closing argument of a campaign. The jury has heard all the evidence that it’s going to hear. The candidates needed to deliver a strong, moving summation. We all know that Obama is capable of stirring oratory, but in the first debate he failed to deliver. The guy with the weaker case made the stronger statement, falsehoods and all, and that is a dangerous thing to allow so close to Election Day.

The Obama campaign must learn from this blunder: stronger is better. The last phase of the campaign is about impressions more than it is about policy.

It is unfortunate, but at this stage, for the undecided people in the middle, substance is a casualty of style. By that measure, Romney outshone the president at this debate.

There are two more chances for the president to change tactics, or at least to show up to the debates energized and nimble: President Xanax just doesn’t cut it.

The question is whether he will.

To read commentary about the first presidential debate by Ross Douthat, Tim Egan, Stanley Fish and Lynn Vavreck, click here.

There are known knowns, there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns, that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.

That was Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous riff on Saddam Hussein’s mythical weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war.

But it occurs to me that those three categories could just as easily be applied to the remainder of the presidential campaign.

The Known Knowns

Mitt Romney is running out of time. His path to victory is growing narrow and dark.

There are only 40 days until Election Day. Early voting has begun or is about to begin in several states and new polls show Romney at or near double-digit deficits in the all-important swing states of Ohio and Florida.

The Romney campaign is buckling under the weight of some big mistakes:

A strategy that assumed that an empty suit could make empty promises and that an electorate full of voters consumed by anger at the president wouldn’t notice.

A candidate who keeps his foot so deep in his mouth that his toes can tickle his cerebellum.

A nominating convention that fell flat.

Romney picking a vice presidential candidate from the far right as he callously sought to siphon far-right enthusiasm without embracing far-right dogma.

The fat lady is waiting in the wings and she’s gargling with honey and lemon juice.

The Known Unknowns

The degree to which voter suppression efforts may undermine the accuracy of opinion polling is unclear. We don’t actually know how many of the “likely voters” in polling models intend to vote and believe themselves to be eligible and registered to vote, but won’t actually be allowed to cast their votes on Nov. 6.

We know that conservative super PACs have an immense war chest, into which billionaires have poured millions of dollars. How will that money be used and will it be effective? Will attacks turn ever more personal as the campaign closes? How will voters respond to the last round of ads?

Then there are the presidential debates. The candidates could upset expectations. Obama could be dull and Romney could shine. (Stop laughing. It’s possible.)

Finally, the news media needs a narrative. Drift is not a satisfying narrative for the culmination of campaign coverage. Rising and falling are narratives. So is resurrection. So is loss of a sure thing.

The media will continue to look for new stories right up until Election Day. That’s not about bias but about a thirst for thrills — for reporters and their audience. That means that as the advantage shifts to Obama, so does the burden of sustaining momentum and avoiding stumbles.

Romney is in a horrible position but, strangely, there is a slim chance that he could benefit from it. If his campaign comes apart, the prurient spectacle of finger pointing and infighting could dominate the final weeks of the campaign. But if his campaign gains an ounce of competence, turning things around could galvanize coverage. The media loves a comeback.

The Unknown Unknowns

Something in me always believes that there is a bombshell waiting to be revealed, a trump card up someone’s sleeve that he or she is waiting until the last moment to play. This could simply be paranoia, but if it were me, that’s the way I’d play the game.

There are also two jobs reports due out between now and Election Day. If they are consistent with previous months, they are unlikely to affect the race. But on the off chance that they are much worse, there could be an impact.

And then there is the uncertainty of foreign affairs. Despite domestic bluster, there is little we can do to control world events, particularly in the Middle East and particularly during an election season. Syria is a simmering pot of atrocities. Anti-American anger is always lingering. Israel has an itchy finger over Iran’s nuclear ambitions. New terror attacks are always possible.

And then there’s Joe Biden. Lovely fellow, but sometimes he spouts off like the drunken uncle at a family reunion. This will make the vice presidential debate must-watch television.

This is all to say that things look good at the moment for President Obama’s re-election, but it’s not a done deal until the votes are known.

As I’m sure you know by now, Romney said that the 47 percent of Americans who pay no income taxes are people who are

dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

He also said:

My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.

There is no amount of backtracking and truth bending that can make this right. It’s just wrong. It’s not just the patently false implication that half the country is parasitic. It’s not just the bleak view that they wallow in victimization. It is also his utter dismissal of this group: “my job is not to worry about those people.”

Those people? Those miserable peasants scrounging around the castle entrance? Those lay-abouts with mouths open for a spoonful of rich folks’ bounty? Those fate-forsaken unwashed with dirty hands outstretched for help unearned? Those ingrates who bring in a pittance but reap a premium?

Only a man who has never looked up from the pit of poverty could look down his nose with such scorn.

At the event Romney also said:

By the way, both my dad and Ann’s dad did quite well in their life, but when they came to the end of their lives, and, and passed along inheritances to Ann and to me, we both decided to give it all away. So, I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work.

Can this man truly be so blind as to believe that being the son of an auto executive and governor played no role in his development and access to opportunity? Can he truly believe that having a family with the means to send him to a prestigious boarding school and then on to some of the best colleges in the country had nothing to do with them and everything to do with him? Can he truly be willfully ignorant enough to not acknowledge the huddled masses at the bottom of the hill just because he started his climb half way up?

Now the Romney campaign is in full damage control mode, feverishly trying to convince Americans that they didn’t hear what they heard, that there was some confusion. Romney first said that his comments were “not elegantly stated,” then he tried to pivot to an argument against the redistribution of wealth, saying he believed in an America where “government steps in to help those in need.” He continued, “we’re a compassionate people.”

Those in need? Would those be the ones “who believe that they are victims,” the ones who it’s not your job to “worry about,” the ones who you’ll never be able to persuade to “take personal responsibility and care for their lives”?

Romney’s feeble explanations reek of insincerity and desperation.

And I think I know why: he’s terrified.

Romney is trapped by a desperate desire for legitimacy. He is a square — in more ways than one — trying to squeeze himself into the conservative circle of trust.

In so doing, he says all the right things the wrong way. His facts are off. His timing is off. His pitch is off. He’s just off. Try as he may, he just doesn’t fit in. But he’s now so lost in his thirst for high office that he has also lost himself. Co-opted convictions will always betray you.

Romney, whose economic plan is titled “Believe in America,” demonstrated with brutal efficiency that he doesn’t in fact believe in America.

I have no personal gripe with Romney. I don’t believe him to be an evil man. Quite the opposite: he appears to be a loving husband and father. Besides, evil requires conviction, which Romney lacks. But he is a dangerous man. Unprincipled ambition always is. Infinite malleability is its own vice because it’s infinitely corruptible by others of ignoble intentions.

But Romney’s taped comments open the door to doubt. I’m no longer confident in the basic goodness of his constitution.

One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.

Mitt Romney keeps showing America who he is. When will we start to believe him?

Justin Sullivan/Getty ImagesSigns and confetti on the floor after the Democratic National Convention at Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, N.C.

Democrats are riding a wave of enthusiasm. Republicans are dreading a Romney wipeout.

President Obama has experienced a post-convention bump, whereas Mitt Romney saw none. A Tuesday Gallup report showed that Obama’s lead over Romney increased 5 points after the Democratic convention. That result echoed findings from a CNN/ORC International poll released Monday.

This may be in part because Democrats bolstered their convention by huge ad spending to maximize exposure. As the Wesleyan Media Project pointed out:

During the Aug. 26 to Sept. 8 period, Obama and his allies aired 40,000 ads on broadcast and national cable television, the vast majority of which were paid for by the Obama campaign. By comparison, Romney and his allies aired 18,000 ads on broadcast and national cable television during that same time period.

There’s more. New fund-raising numbers released this week found that President Obama outraised Romney in August for the first time in months. This won’t make up for the mischief I anticipate from the Republican’s cash-soaked “super PACs,” but it’s an important turn.

And Bill “Big Dog” Clinton has hit the campaign trail in critical swing states and expanded on his devastating convention speech. Clinton is performing a critical function: attacking the faulty math of the ticket that just added a “numbers man,” as Time magazine called Paul Ryan. Clinton’s assault on the Republicans’ arithmetic continues a well-worn political strategy and one that the Obama campaign used incredibly effectively: attack your opponent’s strengths. Clinton is a master at this, smiling in your face and punching you in the gut.

Needless to say, Democrats are feeling good. Republicans, not so much.

There seems to be a sense, even among many of Romney’s supporters, that he’s making too many unforced errors and offering too few specifics.

The Democrats, it seems to us, made better use of their convention than the Republicans made of theirs. The Republican message, especially in the most-watched addresses, seemed less coordinated, deliberate, and focused. Republicans spent too much time explaining what a nice guy Romney is and how happy he is about female empowerment, and not enough time explaining how he would improve the national condition.

I agree with this assessment. The Republican convention was a mess. Ann Romney began her speech by saying “I want to talk to you about love,” only to be followed by the brash, narcissistic Chris Christie who said that we have “become paralyzed by our desire to be loved.”

Talk about whiplash. And it didn’t stop there.

Clint Eastwood, in his now infamous empty-chair “speech,” made a strange reference to the war in Afghanistan. Speaking to an invisible Obama, he said

I know you were against the war in Iraq, and that’s O.K. But you thought the war in Afghanistan was O.K. You know, I mean — you thought that was something that was worth doing. We didn’t check with the Russians to see how they did there for the 10 years.

Of course, Eastwood was followed by Romney, who didn’t even mention the war. When Fox News’s Brett Baier asked him to explain this omission, Romney dug the hole deeper with a nonsensical and arguably offensive rationale:

When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important, and I described in my speech my commitment to a strong military, unlike the president’s decision to cut our military.

Huh? A would-be commander in chief doesn’t think an active war is “important”?

Even worse, on Tuesday the Romney campaign jumped the gun — and skirted the truth — in a highly inappropriate attack on the Obama administration over the anti-American hostilities in Libya and Egypt. In a statement, Romney said:

I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.

He was referring to the embassy statement condemning an American-made Web film denouncing Islam that was the catalyst for the violence. However, the embassy’s statement was released in an effort to head off the violence, not after the attacks, as Mr. Romney’s statement implied.

Oops.

The Romney camp should learn a lesson from journalists: wait until you have the facts. It’s better to be second and right than first and wrong. Knee-jerk reactions can make you look like a jerk.

But after offending the British on his Olympics trip and labeling Russia our “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Mitt was already well on his way to proving that he is a diplomatic disaster. This week the Russian president, Vladimir Putin thanked Romney for the label, saying that it had helped Russia because it had “proven the correctness of our approach to missile defense problems.”

Yeah, thanks Mitt.

But perhaps Romney’s biggest mistake has been his allergy to specificity on his plans for the economy even though he’s running on a promise to reform and recharge it.

It’s one thing to identify a problem, say you care about it, and even list some steps you would take to address it. It’s another thing to convince people that you can really do the job. Many people wonder, and not without reason, whether any president can really do this job. So what else might you do? I suggest that your focus on the economy and jobs would be strengthened by more detailed discussions of policies you would enact, and also of related issues, notably Obamacare and Medicare. The assertion that you are more competent than President Obama strikes many people as merely that — an assertion. It would be supported by your speaking in more detail about a range of financial issues.

This is a major miscalculation by Romney: that somehow he can simply run out the clock without ever providing specifics (or those tax returns for that matter), and anti-Obama sentiment will magically deliver him the White House. Fear is a great political motivator, but confidence and security also play a role in presidential politics.

The Romney campaign sent out a memo on Monday to “Interested Parties”meant to assuage fears. The first paragraph began:

Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling. While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly.

This sounds like one of those affirmations that you tape to your bathroom mirror and repeat every morning when your life is in the doldrums and you’re in need of direction.

But self-reassurance can’t compensate for self-destructiveness. Those of us who have been forced to reckon with our own mistakes know that well.

If viewers thought Democrats might tuck in their tails and run away from the president’s record, they were mistaken. The speakers gave full-throated, bare-fanged defenses of Barack Obama — rattling off hours of his accomplishments — and they used that record to draw a stark distinction with the plans of Mitt Romney, whom they attacked with unfettered ferocity.

The Democrats came to the party ready for a fight.

If you had to sum it up in a word, it would probably be defiance, as in defying the polls, defying the pundits and defying some harsh political realities.

The energetic and consistent speeches — all a variation on the theme of an already present and still-growing America that the Republicans are willfully and possibly even congenitally blind to — ran counter to tight polls, the “enthusiasm-gap” hawks of cable news and a still-struggling economy.

As Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, told the crowd Tuesday:

My message is this — it is time for Democrats to grow a backbone and stand up for what we believe. Quit waiting – quit waiting, quit waiting for pundits or polls or super PACs to tell us who the next president or senator or congressman will be. We are Americans. We shape our own future.

To soften the first night it took the first lady, who, in dulcet tones but to devastating effect, delivered an exquisitely crafted speech that linked her personal love for her husband to devout Democrats’ endless love affair with both of them. And her speech did something that Ann Romney’s failed to do: it gave listeners an inside look at how her husband approached problems and worked through them.

One criticism of Obama, even among many supporters, is that he can sometimes seem detached. The first lady painted a portrait of a man who is empathetic and engaged. The crowd swooned.

Wednesday was a little more uneven and a little less well-scripted, but the masterful Bill Clinton wrapped the evening up as only he could: delivering a wonky speech with the passion of a Southern preacher and keeping the crowd rapt the whole way through.

“I want to nominate a man cool on the outside but burning for America on the inside,” Clinton said near the beginning of his speech, and by the end he was arguing starkly that

when we vote in this election, we’ll be deciding what kind of country we want to live in. If you want a winner-take-all, you’re-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket. But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility, a we’re-all-in-this-together society, you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

Whatever Clinton’s faults, oration is his gift. No speaker at the Republican National Convention even came close.

It’s not clear if the Democrats’ performance will win converts — on Tuesday Gallup reported that there was no bounce in the polls for Romney after his convention — but their speeches may well stiffen loyalists’ spines. In an evenly divided election where a win or a loss may come down to mobilization and turnout, that’s not nothing.

Pinocchio wants to be a real person, and on Thursday night he’s going to attempt to make the transformation on national television.

The wooden Mitt Romney, who keeps pushing the blatant lie that President Obama wants to eliminate the work requirement for welfare, will give an acceptance speech that will be the culmination of a week designed to humanize and reintroduce him.

His bid for the White House may largely depend on how successfully he delivers that speech. Although he and Obama are virtually tied in the polls, Romney is losing the Electoral College count.

There are many reasons for that, including his campaign’s retro-radical policy positions in an increasingly diverse and increasingly socially progressive country. And then there’s his inability to connect with voters on a visceral level. Romney continues to trail Obama badly in terms of favorability and likability.

Overall, a modern convention is a non-news event, although you wouldn’t know that looking at the media swarm here in Tampa, Fla. The city was expecting up to 15,000 journalists, who would outnumber delegates and alternates by a margin of three to one.

Conventions are candidate coronations. But with all the media attention, they’re also unrivaled public relations events (except of course when Mother Nature gives birth to a hurricane named Isaac). All the scripts and glitz and camera-ready choreography are designed to whip up the faithful, to woo the wavering and to reach out to the disengaged.

It is here that Romney will make the plea to be normal, to be made real.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about the lies.

The Romney campaign is continuing to push the false notion that Obama has moved to eliminate the work requirement for welfare. Earlier this month, the Washington Post fact checker gave the charge its worst rating: Four Pinocchios. Tampa’s own PolitiFact also gave the claim its worst rating: pants on fire. And FactCheck.org concluded that the claim was false.

The tendency of the Romney campaign to intentionally misrepresent the truth has become a defining trait of this campaign cycle – though it is at odds with Romney’s own statements. Politico reported on Aug. 9, after Romney’s first false welfare charge, that he had said in a radio interview:

You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad. They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.

That’s rich.

Now to warm and fuzzies.

On Tuesday night Ann Romney delivered a speech that started with the sappy line, “Tonight I want to talk to you about love,” and ended with a thud. The motif was Mitt, the boy she “met at a high school dance,” a fact that she repeated in some derivation six times. But there was something about the homage that felt hollow.

Mrs. Romney said that she wanted to “talk to you from my heart about our hearts,” but never the twain did meet. She tried, and I believe that maybe she could have delivered with a better-crafted speech, one with more killer lines and less killing me softly.

But the Romney campaign is hedging its bets in case no one can sell the “real Mitt.”

Gov. Chris Christie, delivering what FactCheck.org dubbed a “fact-free keynote,” imparted the opposite message from Mrs. Romney, as Mitt sat stiff and uncomfortable, looking like he was either choking back tears or regretting his lunch. Christie told the crowd, “I believe we have become paralyzed — paralyzed by our desire to be loved.” Later he said:

Tonight, we choose respect over love. We are not afraid. We are taking our country back.

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison told MSNBC this week that “it’s not whether you like someone to elect them president, it’s whether that person will do the best for this country.” Romney himself summoned a certain rough-necked sailor, telling Fox News, “Remember that Popeye line: ‘I am what I am, and that’s all what I am.’”

Thursday will be showdown between Pinocchio and Popeye.

Mitt will get his last major chance to do what his wife couldn’t: to make America look past the lies and see a real person.

The noxious “legitimate rape” comment by Todd Akin, Missouri congressman and Senate candidate, has me once again pondering a simple question: Why do any women vote Republican?

The Republican establishment rushed in to pressure Akin to drop out of the race — something that he refused to do — in part because they want to win the seat, win control of the Senate and win Missouri for Romney. A SurveyUSA poll earlier this month — before “legitimate rape” — found Romney and Obama in a statistical tie in the state.

As a legislator, Mr. Akin has a record on abortion that is largely indistinguishable from those of most of his Republican House colleagues, who have viewed restricting abortion rights as one of their top priorities.

In fact, as this story reverberated through the public discourse, the Republican National Committee’s platform committee passed what one committee member told the Washington Times “appears to be the most conservative platform in modern history.” Among other things, it calls for a “human life amendment” with no exemption for rape or incest and praises “informed consent” laws.

Republicans are worried about the political fallout from Akin’s comment, though.

I’ve seen all of the things that you’ve seen, people telling him he should go. He needs to get out for the good of the party, for the good of the country, for the good of the presidential campaign, and we gotta defeat Obama. I agree with that, by the way. I think there are a lot of things here larger than single individuals.

Sandra Fluke introduced President Obama at a campaign event in Denver on Wednesday.

Single women are one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups — there are 1.8 million more now than just two years ago. They make up a quarter of the voting-age population nationally, and even more in several swing states, including Nevada. And though they lean Democratic — in a recent New York Times/CBS News poll, single women favored Mr. Obama over his Republican rival, Mitt Romney, by 29 points — they are also fickle about casting their ballots, preoccupied with making ends meet and alienated from a political system they say is increasingly deaf to their concerns.

On the one hand, the Republican establishment wants to battle the perception that the party is waging a war on women — which it is — by claiming that women’s economic interests are separate and distinct from their health interests. But that’s a false argument for many women because the two, particularly when it comes to reproductive control, are inextricably intertwined. Children dramatically affect one’s financial bottom line.

Self-sufficiency is tied up in self-determination. Family planning is essential to career planning. This is particularly true for single women.

On the other hand, there are those on the fringe of the party who are less beholden to the establishment and constrained by convention. They air the party’s frustration with these single women voters and don’t try to disguise their disdain.

Ronald Reagan managed to win two landslides without winning the women’s vote, but it is as you say, it’s striking, it’s not the women’s vote generically, it is the single women’s vote. And that’s because single women look to the government to be their husbands and give them, you know, prenatal care, and preschool care, and kindergarten care, and school lunches.

The Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson — who has made a number of appearances on Fox News, founded a Tea Party group in California and is also the founder of a group called BOND (Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny) — recently gave a speech (I hope it wasn’t a sermon), in which he said:

One of the primary reasons that it is over for America is because women are taking over, women are taking over, they’re in high so-called powerful position, they’re now running companies, they’re making decisions.

He then pointed out that he was not referring to all women:

The are some, a few out there that are logical women and can make sound decisions, but most cannot.

He prattled on nonsensically for a while, adding that “women cannot handle power, it’s not in them to handle power in the right way” and “women have been degraded, women are now degraded, they have no shame.”

I’m getting upset just transcribing this, so let me just get to the meat of it. Here’s the part of his speech I wanted you to see:

I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made was to allow women the opportunity to vote. We should’ve never turned it over to women.

Why? Because “they’re voting in people who are evil.”

Now, on BOND’s website, both Sean Hannity and Dennis Prager, another conservative radio host, are listed as members of BOND’s advisory board. The Web site attributes the following endorsement to Hannity:

BOND has played an instrumental role in helping young men and women build lives which will help inspire the next generation. BOND continues to fight the good fight standing for the values of God, family, and country, and are deserving of our support.

And it attributes an endorsement to Prager that reads in part:

Whatever the issue, Jesse seeks truth and speaks with courage. Even on the few matters that I may not entirely agree with Jesse, he forces me to think a second and third time. He is so morally grounded and fearless that when we differ, my first reaction is to ask myself, ‘Where did I go wrong?’

This brings me back to my original question: why do women vote Republican? Even if you are personally pro-life you don’t have to be universally anti-choice. This is the party that attacks reproductive rights and limits women’s health options — which has the effect of limiting women’s economic liberty — and whose proxies on the radio and TV openly show disdain for women, especially those not hitched to a man.

Even if you’re married now, you weren’t always. You too were once a single lady.

Attack your opponent’s strength: that has become the fundamental rule of modern politics.

The Obama campaign has had quite a bit of success attacking Romney’s success. So much so that last week Romney jumped off the cliff of desperation and chose Paul Ryan, the Republican wonk star, Tea Party darling and boy wonder of dubious budgets, as his running mate.

This essentially shifted the campaign’s conversation from Romney’s best hope, a focus on the economy, to a worst case scenario — a didactic discussion of policy, particularly Medicare, in which Romney and Ryan (I like Ry-omney) must tell America to eat its spinach so we can grow up strong.

Having a debate about fundamentally changing Medicare during an election in which the two biggest swing states, Florida and Pennsylvania, are also among those with the greatest percentage of the elderly (17.3 and 15.4 percent, respectively)? Sounds like a campaign with a death wish.

One thing that we learned from the health care debate is that many Americans resist change, on principle, even if might benefit them, because they are afraid of it. And it’s hard for education campaigns to have an impact on an electorate conditioned to 15-second clips and satisfied with sound-bites.

Americans can have big discussions about big issues, but math and minor details are a hard combination to hang a campaign on.

So by hammering Romney on his strength, the Obama campaign forced him to make a disastrous choice for a running mate. According to a Gallup report issued on Monday, the response to the Ryan pick “is among the least positive reactions to a vice presidential choice Gallup has recorded in recent elections.” Score one for Team Obama.

But now Romney appears to be going after Obama’s strength: his likability.

And so his campaign has resorted to diversions and distractions, to demagoguing and defaming others. This is an old game in politics; what’s different this year is that the president is taking things to a new low. His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency.

Romney continued:

Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like.

That was a reference to an unfortunate comment Vice President Joe Biden made to a largely black audience in Virginia. Biden said:

Romney wants to let the — he said the first 100 days — he’s gonna let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. He gonna put y’all back in chains.

Some have suggested that Biden’s comment was a reference to slavery. If it was, I’m not a fan of such references. But it’s hardly the place of the Republicans to object now, given that they said nothing when one of their primary candidates, Herman Cain, stewed in slavery metaphors. Cain was fond of saying that he had left the “Democrat plantation.” In one speech, Cain said, about being a black conservative, “I tell some of my callers: It may shock you, but some black people can think for themselves.” In an ad, Cain said: “our tax code is the 21st century version of slavery.”

I don’t recall Republicans complaining then. In fact, Cain even led in the polls for a while. This feels hypocritical.

We should have seen Romney’s new tack coming, because he began hinting at it last week. As NBC News reported Friday, Romney “said in the interview he would like a pledge (of sorts) with Obama that there be no ‘personal’ attack ads”:

Our campaign would be helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon — business or family or taxes or things of that nature.

Question: Is Romney really saying that scrutinizing his business record — which he has held up as one of his chief qualifications to be president — is personal? But we digress.

He continued: “We only talk about issues. And we can talk about the differences between our positions and our opponent’s position.”

Of his own campaign, Romney said:

Our ads haven’t gone after the president personally.… We haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.

The Romney campaign’s special pleading for substance and civility is strange given that the super PACs supporting it drowned his primary opponents in negative ads.

At the time, Romney’s take on negative advertising was clear: “If you can’t stand the relatively modest heat in the kitchen right now wait until Obama’s hell’s kitchen shows up.”

Well, it has shown up and it has worked just like Romney’s did then. Now he’s whining that Obama is winning.

So far the Obama campaign has simply outsmarted the Romney campaign in the electoral art of war. This change in strategy is just Romney’s most recent attempt to regain his footing: trying to paint a likable president as a hateful one.

It’s one thing when campaign supporters and even surrogates issue scurrilous attacks on their candidate’s opponent— both sides have done some of this — but it’s another thing altogether when those accusations become a central line of attack stemming from the candidate himself.

Earlier this week, Mitt Romney claimed that President Obama had moved to eliminate the work requirement for welfare recipients.

Romney pushed the point in an ad with the narrator saying:

On July 12, President Obama quietly announced a plan to gut welfare reform by dropping work requirements. Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check, and ‘welfare to work’ goes back to being plain old welfare.

Never mind that, as Talking Points Memo pointed out Tuesday: “In 2005, Romney and 28 other Republican governors wrote a letter to Congress requesting even more flexibility than Obama has offered, for the purpose of ‘[e]mpowering states to seek new and innovative solutions to help welfare recipients achieve independence.’”

is issuing this information memorandum to notify states of the Secretary’s willingness to exercise her waiver authority under section 1115 of the Social Security Act to allow states to test alternative and innovative strategies, policies, and procedures that are designed to improve employment outcomes for needy families.

The memo continued:

The Secretary is interested in using her authority to approve waiver demonstrations to challenge states to engage in a new round of innovation that seeks to find more effective mechanisms for helping families succeed in employment. In providing for these demonstrations, H.H.S. will hold states accountable by requiring both a federally-approved evaluation and interim performance targets that ensure an immediate focus on measurable outcomes.

Furthermore:

States that fail to meet interim outcome targets will be required to develop an improvement plan and can face termination of the waiver project.

That’s right, the Department of Health and Human Services was granting flexibility to states because it wanted to improve employment outcomes and H.H.S. promised to terminate the waiver if states didn’t meet the targets.

The ad’s claim is not accurate, and it inflames old resentments about able-bodied adults sitting around collecting public assistance. Pants on Fire!

“Pants on Fire” is PolitiFact’s worst rating.

And the welfare claim comes on the heels of Romney accusing the president of filing a lawsuit “claiming it is unconstitutional for Ohio to allow servicemen and women extended early voting privileges during the state’s early voting period.” In reality, as Factcheck.org pointed out, “the Democratic lawsuit seeks to restore early voting ‘for all Ohio voters,’ ” because “Ohio’s GOP-controlled Legislature in 2011 limited early voting for nonmilitary residents.” Politifact said that what voters got from the Romney campaign “is a falsehood.” In other words, a lie.

What could push a man to hang his hat on so sharp a nail? Fear, that’s what.

As we move into the conventions, the Republican candidate is still down in the polls — two recent surveys have deplorable favorability numbers for Romney. At this point, according to my colleague Nate Silver’s blog, FiveThirtyEight, Obama is favored to win in November.

Romney has to find a line of attack that works because there is a creeping feeling beginning to overtake part of the electorate that his candidacy is in trouble. The problem is that these sorts of desperate, baseless attacks only amplify the sense of panic.

Polls are the best way to find out who plans to vote and for whom they plan to vote. But polls are imperfect. They ask questions of a sampling of people — often about a thousand — and use those answers to draw conclusions about the public at large.

This year there is a new wrinkle, one that complicates the picture and could throw some of the polling off: the effects of newly enacted restrictive voting laws.

Take, for instance, the results of a New York Times/CBS News/Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday. “Likely voters” were polled in the swing states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and President Obama led Mitt Romney in each state — by 6 points in Ohio and Florida and by 11 points in Pennsylvania. President Obama carried all three states in the last election and needs them in this one. Encouraging for him, right?

But let’s dig in a bit and look at some of the variables that could weigh on those results.

First, there are the quirks that always exist. It’s August and many voters aren’t intensely focused on the election yet. Sixty percent or less in each state say that they are paying a lot of attention to the presidential campaign at this point, and these are states that have been soaked in ads and visited often by the candidates. (On Wednesday, Obama made his 25th trip to Ohio since becoming president.)

People also tend to overstate their intention to vote. Many national and state polls show that more than three quarters of respondents say they will definitely vote in upcoming presidential elections. This is a major component of the way pollsters determine “likely voters.” But that level of voting is not supported by historical patterns. According to the United States Elections Project, the turnout rate for the voting-eligible population in Florida in 2008 was just 67 percent, in Ohio it was 68 percent and in Pennsylvania it was 64 percent. So many of those who say that they are definitely going to vote actually won’t.

Then there are the new voter restrictions that are likely to trim the voter rolls and add tremendous voter confusion.

Pennsylvania has passed a highly restrictive photo ID requirement for its voters. A study conducted by professors from the University of Washington and the University of New Mexico found that more than a million registered voters in Pennsylvania and 757,325 people who voted in 2008 lack a valid ID under this scheme. More than a third of registered voters are unaware that a photo ID law even exists.

This means that a lot of people who say that they are likely to vote may not actually be eligible to vote. (Arguments in a suit contesting the Pennsylvania law are being heard this week .)

Now to Florida and Ohio: both states have cut their early voting periods. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, more than a million people who voted in Florida and Ohio in 2008 did so on days that have been eliminated.

The state doesn’t track its early voters by party, so the stats don’t show exactly how much Obama might have benefited from early voting in Ohio. But both parties are sure he did. An extended voting period is perceived as benefiting Democrats because it increases voting opportunities for those harder to reach for an Election Day turnout — Hispanics, blacks, new citizens and poor people.

Florida has already moved to potentially purge thousands of voters from its registration rolls. In May, The Miami Herald said of the purge:

Hispanic, Democratic and independent-minded voters are the most likely to be targeted in a state hunt to remove thousands of noncitizens from Florida’s voting rolls, a Miami Herald computer analysis of elections records has found. Whites and Republicans are disproportionately the least-likely to face the threat of removal, the analysis of a list of more than 2,600 potential noncitizens shows.

The Florida Board of Executive Clemency, headed by Republican Gov. Rick Scott, reversed predecessor Republican Gov. Charlie Crist‘s policy that automatically restored voting rights to non-violent offenders upon the completion of their sentences. Ex-felons must now wait five years before applying to regain rights.

The newspaper pointed out that “the Sentencing Project, a group advocating reforms in prison and sentencing policy, says 60% of the prison system population is made up of African Americans and Latinos.” It almost goes without saying that these groups traditionally vote more Democratic.

Rolling Stone reported in May that this could disenfranchise “100,000 previously eligible ex-felons” in Florida.

It’s unclear how many voters are aware of the new rules, and whether they’d be able to vote even if they were. What is clear is that fewer Democrats say that they are paying a lot of attention to the election in these three states than Republicans, by a margin of 8 to 14 percentage points. It would stand to reason that they might also be less aware of the new laws.

This year, we may have to take the polls with an even larger grain of salt than usual. The greatest margin of uncertainty may well be caused by poll respondents who think that they will able to vote for President Obama in November, but may not be allowed to do so.

About

Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.